Real Estate

Charles Gordon Brown Brown & Bunch PLLC, Chapel Hill

My favorite place is Seven Mile Farm, our family farm in western Orange County near Efland. I can walk the roads, the fields and the woods in any season, in any weather and in any mood. It is as exciting and energizing to me today as it was in my pre-teens. Nothing fills the spirit like a hike at Seven Mile Farm.

Vita:Born July 31, 1950, in Winston-Salem; bachelor’s from UNC Chapel Hill and law degree from the University of Virginia; wife, four sons and a daughter.Why he chose this field:Dirt happens. My first employer (Alston, Miller & Gaines, now Alston & Bird) emphasized an interdisciplinary approach and insisted that I receive significant substantive exposure to real estate, litigation, construction law, secured transactions and similar areas. Being able to try a real-estate-related case has made me a better real-estate lawyer, and being able to close a complex real-estate-based transaction has made me a better litigator.What he’d be if not a lawyer:A geologist. (Dirt is dirt.)Memorable case:Our representation of a Northeastern lender caught up in the wave of time-share frauds in the mid-1980s had all the intrigue of a Tom Clancy novel — and portions of it took more than a decade to complete. Not counting the gun battles (literally), lawsuits and nights spent in the vault of a sympathetic register of deeds, just straightening out the title morass was one of the more challenging matters we have ever undertaken.Don’t ask him to:Go to the dentist.